When Brian Grubbs moved to Springfield, MO, in 2007 so his wife, Erin, could attend graduate school, he found that his own master’s degree in museum studies wasn’t landing him a job. After a few months, Erin spotted a promising listing on the Springfield–Greene County Library District’s website: a position digitizing collections documenting the Civil War in the Ozarks.

“Busman’s Holiday” seems like a more seemly title for this column than what I originally planned to use to describe how I’ve been spending my winter vacation: “an orgy of reading.” But that’s really what I’ve been indulging in, and am at present very happily drunk on words. Having earned a BS in literature years ago, I tend not to read serious stuff any longer (the second class in which we had to study Sartre’s Nausea cured me of so-called serious literature) and now I mostly read mysteries for fun… but that changed a bit last year because of a library conference.